New Review Process

We want the thousands of add-ons available in our gallery to be safe for users to install, so early last year we set out to find a solution to the thousands of unreviewed add-ons living in our “sandbox”. We wanted add-ons to be reviewed in a way that would also allow developers to upload and distribute their work quickly in order to receive feedback from our community of add-on fans always looking to try new things.

After several proposals and discussions with add-on developers, we came up with the concept of preliminary review, which is a lighter review that only checks for security issues. These reviews are much faster than full reviews and may still contain functional bugs and policy violations, but should be safe to use. Developers will now be able to choose a review process at submission, and while they’re waiting for review, can blog or share the direct link to their add-on.

Anyone interested in learning more about the new review process should read our updated Review Process Policy page. Authors of add-ons currently in the sandbox will receive an email next week with instructions on how to continue hosting their add-on in our gallery. The only change authors of “public” add-ons should see is that they are now called “fully reviewed” instead.

Justin is a Product Manager helping experimental projects reach their potential in Mozilla Labs. He previously worked on the Firefox Marketplace for HTML5 apps and led the Firefox Add-ons team, helping millions of users customize Firefox to make it their own.